Light | Page 2

last day of
March--one glimpses the workmen's houses, upright in space, hazy and
fantastic chessboards, with squares of light dabbed on in places, or like
vertical cliffs in which our swarming is absorbed. Scattering among the
twilight colonnade of the trees, these people engulf themselves in the
heaped-up lodgings and rooms; they flow together in the cavity of
doors; they plunge into the houses; and there they are vaguely turned

into lights.
I continue to walk, surrounded by several companions who are foremen
and clerks, for I do not associate with the workmen. Then there are
handshakes, and I go on alone.
Some dimly seen wayfarers disappear; the sounds of sliding locks and
closing shutters are heard here and there; the houses have shut
themselves up, the night-bound town becomes a desert profound. I can
hear nothing now but my own footfall.
Viviers is divided into two parts--like many towns, no doubt. First, the
rich town, composed of the main street, where you find the Grand
Café, the elegant hotels, the sculptured houses, the church and the
castle on the hill-top. The other is the lower town, which I am now
entering. It is a system of streets reached by an extension of that avenue
which is flanked by the workmen's barracks and climbs to the level of
the factory. Such is the way which it has been my custom to climb in
the morning and to descend when the light is done, during the six years
of my clerkship with Messrs. Gozlan & Co. In this quarter I am still
rooted. Some day I should like to live yonder; but between the two
halves of the town there is a division--a sort of frontier, which has
always been and will always be.
In the Rue Verte I meet only a street lamp, and then a mouse-like little
girl who emerges from the shadows and enters them again without
seeing me, so intent is she on pressing to her heart, like a doll, the big
loaf they have sent her to buy. Here is the Rue de l'Etape, my street.
Through the semi-darkness, a luminous movement peoples the
hairdresser's shop, and takes shape on the dull screen of his window.
His transparent door, with its arched inscription, opens just as I pass,
and under the soap-dish,[1] whose jingle summons customers,
Monsieur Justin Pocard himself appears, along with a rich gust of
scented light. He is seeing a customer out, and improving the occasion
by the utterance of certain sentiments; and I had time to see that the
customer, convinced, nodded assent, and that Monsieur Pocard, the
oracle, was caressing his white and ever-new beard with his luminous
hand.

[Footnote 1: The hanging sign of a French barber.--Tr.]
I turn round the cracked walls of the former tinplate works, now bowed
and crumbling, whose windows are felted with grime or broken into
black stars. A few steps farther I think I saw the childish shadow of
little Antoinette, whose bad eyes they don't seem to be curing; but not
being certain enough to go and find her I turn into my court, as I do
every evening.
Every evening I find Monsieur Crillon at the door of his shop at the end
of the court, where all day long he is fiercely bent upon trivial jobs, and
he rises before me like a post. At sight of me the kindly giant nods his
big, shaven face, and the square cap on top, his huge nose and vast ears.
He taps the leather apron that is hard as a plank. He sweeps me along to
the side of the street, sets my back against the porch and says to me, in
a low voice, but with heated conviction, "That Pétrarque chap, he's
really a bad lot."
He takes off his cap, and while the crescendo nodding of his bristly
head seems to brush the night, he adds: "I've mended him his purse. It
had become percolated. I've put him a patch on that cost me thirty
centimes, and I've resewn the edge with braid, and all the lot. They're
expensive, them jobs. Well, when I open my mouth to talk about that
matter of his sewing-machine that I'm interested in and that he can't use
himself, he becomes congealed."
He recounts to me the mad claims of Trompson in the matter of his new
soles, and the conduct of Monsieur Becret, who, though old enough to
know better, had taken advantage of his good faith by paying for the
repair of his spout with a knife "that would cut anything it sees." He
goes on to detail for my benefit all the important matters in his life.
Then he says, "I'm not rich, I'm not, but I'm consentious. If I'm a
botcher, it's 'cos